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What is it that differentiates dignity from stubbornness?
Moral rectitude from pride?
Attitude. Intention. Motivation.
Knut Hamsun’s autobiographical novella explores the tenuous line that separates the iron will from the almost obsession of an aspiring writer who refuses to give way to the silent pressure of a dehumanized society that insists on nullifying his efforts to earn his living through his writing.

The protagonist is a nameless narrator who seldom raises sympathy from an estranged reader because he seems to be the source of all his misery and keeps on refusing help that is not merited by what he considers honest means � in his standards, composing high quality articles.
Such apparently scrupulous moral values collide violently with the fastidious nature of this dubious individual. He is vengeful, arrogant and self-righteous; a narcissist, a masochist who grovels in self-pity one moment and is inexplicably ecstatic the next, spurred by his unappreciated worthiness as an artist of the word. Is it delusion or outstanding genius that rules his erratic actions?

Presented in four fragmented chapters, the dramatic spectrum of Knut’s setting contrasts with the acerbic humor displayed by the unattractive narrator, and there is a cyclical pattern in the manifestations of both shown always in the same order: jocularity that go hand in hand with relative economic stability at the beginning of each section and a galloping downfall towards uttermost penury that almost ends by the protagonist’s death from prolonged periods of starvation to close each part.
Kristiana, the Norwegian city, opens and closes the story and remains the impassible spectator of the tribulations of this individual and the silent prosecutor of his fate, echoing authors like Rodenbach, Camus or Kafka who depicted alienation amidst an indifferent society using the modernistic hues of symbolism, surrealism and existentialist doctrines.

At the end of the last chapter, the reader has followed the histrionic ups and downs of a man who has stopped being ashamed of his poverty, a man who has suffered a subtle but ongoing transformation and defeated his physical needs, his craving for acceptance and social recognition. He always arrives late, the clock mocks him, but he tries and tries and tries again, almost in Sisyphean effort. Extreme hunger hasn’t killed him, cold and permanent dampness hasn’t frozen his spirit, repeated rejection hasn’t diminished his self-esteem. Contrarily, the extremity of his degradation has given free rein to his creative drive, and the hunger to write, the lust to compose is what has kept him alive, what has finally set him free.

I stare at the cover illustration of my edition, Edvard Munch’s “Anxiety�, and ponder about the real horrors of existence. It might be better to embrace loneliness as one of the predominant states in human nature than to sell one’s soul for the superficial acceptance of the faceless multitude that silently marches off towards the comfortable palace of invisibility. But, is it?